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The voice of Britain’s right-wing agent-provocateur, Tommy Robinson is the best-known, infamous figure on the far-right of UK politics and, being the subject of Naughty Nigel and Elon Musk’s high-profile ‘free-speech’ spat, has elevated him even further within the public consciousness. But who exactly is Tommy Robinson?
The 41-year old’s real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and he grew up in Luton, a town with a large Muslim minority. He was an aircraft apprentice engineer at the Bedfordshire airport, but in 2005 he assaulted an off-duty police officer, which resulted in a twelve month custodial sentence and his being shown the hangar door. The year earlier, he’d joined the far-right British National Party (BNP) and adopted his nom de guerre in honour of a notorious Luton Town football hooligan. And there was I thinking it was a gentle nod to of one of our first openly-gay pop stars and his band of merry men!
In 2009 he went one step further and founded, with other like-minded terrace-terrors, the English Defence League (EDL), an organisation that actively cultivated links with the Norwegian white supremacist mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Nice. From 2017, he was positing himself as a correspondent for Rebel News, a Canadian far-right website, and it’s here he first became noted for commenting on the ‘grooming gangs’ operated by Asian men across the north. Opposed to immigration and to Islam, he believes that Britain has a two-tier police force that is perpetually soft on migrant criminals: “We’re losing our culture. We’re losing our identity. We’re being replaced. We’re becoming minorities in most major cities. We’re being driven out of our own country, our own towns.”
In general, Robinson intentionally stops short of directly inciting aggression but was banned from Twitter for violating its rules on ‘hateful content’ and from Facebook and Instagram for ‘posting material that uses dehumanising language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims”. Needless to say, following Elon’s purchase of Twitter, Tommy’s hate-filled account was unsurprisingly reinstated.
A wrong ‘un from the off, on top of his two assault convictions, in 2013 Robinson was jailed for ten months for travelling to the US on another man’s passport and, the following year, was sentenced to eighteen months for mortgage fraud. En-route to his current role as Elon’s preferred new leader of Reform, he’s collected a further nine-month jail sentence for contempt of court, has been ordered to pat #100,000 libel damages and is currently having his tax affairs investigated by HMRC. Having fled the UK, he’s now in residence in sunny Cyprus and attracts vocal support and funding from the US, where he has become a darling of the Trumpian/Musk community. Rock-on, Tommy!
So what does the current incumbent think of the new upstart? Well, it’ll come as no great surprise that the two share common ground.
In positioning itself as the truth-sayer on an issue that other parties are wary of addressing, Reform now has its USP and Farage makes no bones about blaming everything from lack of housing to overstretched infrastructure, GP waiting-lists to cost-of-living inflation, on migration. It won them more than four million votes in the last general election and current polls place the party’s popularity above that of both Labour and the Tories. With savvy-nous, Farage has called this one correctly and rightfully distanced himself from the footie fascist but irrespective of the banal involvement of a disingenuous, divisive disruptor, it’s time, sadly, to take Reform seriously.
